The Register Covers Sonatype's Quest to Conquer the IDE

“A Maven plug-in for Eclipse called M2Eclipse is due in the next eight weeks. This will integrate the two environments, providing automatic mapping of assets from build to release, eliminating the potential for bugs to creep in to the handover between teams. Integration is currently tricky and done by hand.

M2Eclipse will map repositories, project metadata, dependencies and configuration information of software built in Eclipse to the Maven project object model. Those building inside Eclipse will also be able to search projects and find plug-ins held in the Maven Central Repository.

Maven [Central Repository] creator Jason van Zyl told El Reg the duo are striving to create a development environment as powerful as Visual Studio – only for Java.”